Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
>"The heavy hydrogen in the seas can drive all our machines, heat all
>our cities, for as far ahead as we can imagine. If, as is perfectly
>possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be
>through our own incompetence. We will be like
If my invention works, then it's even worse. More like Stone Age men freezing
to death on top of a coal bed, when a visitor from the next cave has already
told them that you can burn the stuff, but they laughed at him for saying you
could burn rocks.
I cannot judge whether your invention works or not, but in a very
real sense, anyone who knows a good deal about conventional energy
sources feels the way you do. Anyone who knows the basics about solar
thermal generators, plug-in hybrid automobiles, and CFL lights and so
on knows that we could generate more low-cost, pollution-free
electricity, and that we waste vast amounts of energy. Clarke knew
this in 1963 when he wrote that passage. Things have improved since
then, but we could still reduce energy consumption by a large factor.
We could do this with existing technology, at a profit, for crying
out loud! It is incredible to me that we have failed to do this.
The same kind of irrationality hampers progress in health care.
Frankly, I think a strong dose of free-market capitalism and
anti-trust enforcement would help both sectors, but this is prevented
by a combination of misguided government and industry cartels.
Conventional sources such as solar thermal or advanced fission could
provide far more energy per capita with greatly reduced pollution.
Cold fusion or some other radically new source of energy could do
this at a cost 100 to 1000 times cheaper than any of these
conventional sources, and they could produce trillions of times more
energy, in case we decide to cut the Moon into small pieces or
vaporize Mars. (I am assuming we would use sources of deuterium
outside the Earth.) The only thing that can produce more energy than
cold fusion would be direct use of solar energy on a
solar-system-wide basis; i.e., enveloping a large fraction of the Sun
in a gigantic array of collectors (PVs, or something like that). That
would give us enough energy to vaporize Mars in a few days or weeks.
Freeman Dyson and others have discussed this prospect.
- Jed
